Oracle has an excellent way to present its documents.
Michela Light at TeraTech wrote an article about ColdFusion hosting options. It is copied here.
How do you choose the best ColdFusion hosting provider for your company’s project or app?
In case you need more time to read the entire article, you can download and read it later. Download the whole article in PDF.
Let us help you select the best ColdFusion vendor for your situation. This means avoiding the headaches of deciding between so many different CF hosting companies, so let's eliminate our enemy and start our journey!
Note: The companies listed below do not pay or compensate TeraTech. And unlike many other articles on CF hosting, we don’t use affiliate links either.
We have listed companies alphabetically below to avoid bias from the orders they are given.
“In all reality hosting companies is not an indicator. With the advent of docker and commandbox ANY hosting company is a CFML hosting company. So in all reality there are more hosting companies for CFML right now than ever since it’s inception.” - Luis Majano
Each vendor has different strengths and weaknesses. To identify the best vendor for your specific situation, start by defining your requirements for a ColdFusion hosting service. Define your top priorities:
One big factor: Which variant of ColdFusion are you using? ACF, Lucee, Enterprise Standard…
CF Enterprise VS CF Standard
Which version of Adobe ColdFusion are you running? CF Enterprise is an advanced version of the development platform that provides many more features than CF Standard. You can run multiple CF-developed websites on a single server with both products. However, ColdFusion Enterprise supports multiple server instances, which may be important if you want to separate out different subsites.
What level of security does your company need? Banking, financial services or e-commerce companies require bulletproof security. A higher level of security will cost more, but the investment may pay off through fewer security breaches.
Higher security usually comes with tighter controls. Some companies favor a more loose approach to security, so it is easier for them to keep innovating, especially during the development phase. If you plan to tighten security as you get closer to launch, make sure you understand the cost and processes you are committing to.
Running a web app without a backup begs for trouble. Fortunately, most companies appreciate the value of backups. But how do you prefer to do your backup? Some web hosting companies, such as Hostwinds, offer automatic backups as part of their packages. Others require you to make backups yourself. If your team is doing their own backups, do you have processes to ensure those backups are made?
Regardless of how you plan to back up, it’s a best practice always to have multiple backups. An external offline backup is often a safe bet.
And no matter how you back up, make sure you test your backups regularly to ensure they can be restored.
Everyone needs a little help sometimes. Don’t assume you will be able to get the support you need. Some hosts provide real-time help, including phone calls, while others focus on a ticket support system with a 24-hour turnaround. If your app is mission-critical, be sure to choose a host that offers real-time, all-hands support.
Plan for growth. If your app goes viral, you should understand ahead of time what to expect in terms of timeframe and cost. Be sure a hosting service can respond to your company’s growth in traffic and data.
Many people consider price their top priority, but we believe in considering it last. Set your “must-have” priorities, then look at the price tag. It’s often easier to adjust your budget than to retool your system and expectations to a cheaper option.
I would like to show you modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, and project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation. For this purpose, I have created a 10- step checklist that you can download (for free)
When I am selecting the best CF host for a particular project, I walk a bit of a tightrope. I try to put myself in a CIO’s position. Making big decisions — often stressed out and sometimes underappreciated. What matters most to you?
The “best” host must fulfill the abovementioned needs while embracing ColdFusion with a dedication that inspires confidence.
To me, peace of mind has as much value as stability or speed.
Of course, your criteria may be different from mine. Keep reading for additional criteria and an independent list of the major CF hosting companies.
The next step is to decide where your CF boxes will live.
Determining your basic hosting needs will dictate how you arrange your servers. Does your company need in-house hosting or managed hosting?
And what’s the difference?
Here’s a pros and cons list for each to help determine which one is right for you.
There is another form of data hosting. Co-location (shared) hosting means storing data on a server at a third-party location. You can access these servers on-site or remotely. Shared hosting offers hybrid In-House and Managed hosting, with a mix of benefits and disadvantages.
Adobe’s ColdFusion experts and developers promised with CF 2021. They delivered. From multi-cloud abilities, allowing users to choose cloud hosting services at a granular level, to an agnostic stance about which service you use, the newest version of CF promises to have more cloud capability than its predecessors and competitors.
You can either roll your own CF cloud hosting solution( using AWS, DO, Google or Microsoft Azure), or use a CF host cloud option. Let’s look at these options in more detail.
xByte Hosting offers cloud CF hosting. As you can see from the testimonials, the clients are happy with the efficiency and quality of their team's work.
Cost: You have the option to use a prebuilt plan or schedule a consult to build your own.
Website: https://www.xbytehosting.com
According to Amazon:
AWS is a secure cloud services platform offering computing power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionalities to help businesses scale and grow.
AWS can be very helpful for ColdFusion developers.
Cost: AWS works as a utilities company. You only pay for what you use. They have a wide array of products with different price points. Beware if you are not careful about usage or hackers gain use of your cloud servers, your AWS bill can go through the roof!
Website: https://aws.amazon.com
Digital Ocean Hosting is a cloud computing platform that focuses on simplicity. Both simple to use and clearly priced Digital Ocean can provide for your ColdFusion needs. The community at Digital Ocean recommends running ColdFusion through Apache Tomcat or Apache HTTP Server.
Cost: Basic services start at $5 per month and can scale up to $960.
Website: https://www.digitalocean.com
GCP is a cloud platform that boasts using Google’s core infrastructure, data analytics, and machine learning. It is server-less, relying strictly on cloud dynamics. They pride themselves on leading the industry in price and performance.
Cost: GCP offers individual products so you can build the package that best suits your needs. A handy pricing calculator is available on the site to assist in constructing your custom line of services.
Website: https://cloud.google.com
Illuminated provides both regular and cloud CF hosting. This company excels in users and services. They are well respected and praised on forums, often rated high when it comes to client satisfaction. Advanced Hosting Services feature some of the following technologies: ColdFusion hosting, .NET, NodeJS, PHP, Lucee, and WordPress 1 click install, site.pro, and Python, among some others.
Cost: you get an option to build your own plans, but the basic price goes from $8/mo.
Website: https://www.illuminatedhosting.com/
One of the fastest-growing cloud service providers is Microsoft Azure. It contains more cloud server regions than any other service provider, making 90% of Fortune 500 companies trust their data with them.
Cost: Microsoft follows the way of GCP and AWS with a pay-as-you-go system, with a free 12-month introductory period for some services. Depending on your selected products, you build a package best suited for your budget. Microsoft Azure is expensive compared to other providers, which Microsoft tacitly acknowledges by offering a cost-saving primer.
Website: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/
Related: Mark Drew offers an enlightening perspective on how to get started with Docker in our podcast, Getting Started Fast with Docker.
Cost: Docker’s basic community edition (CE) is available for free use. However, Enterprise packages are available through consultation and quotes.
Website: https://www.docker.com
Tip: Adobe ColdFusion has offered a list on its website with the noted partners for ColdFusion hosting services. It’s worth listing them here.
Coalesce Solutions works with your company to create a bespoke solution tailored to its business model and ambitions.
Coalesce depends on ColdFusion and AWS to build compliance-centered application server solutions to support their requirements as a PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) Level 1 Service Provider, as well as those of their customers operating in regulated environments with requirements such as PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, and FedRAMP.
Website: https://www.coalesceservices.com/migration-acceleration
CFDynamics provides hosting services for ColdFusion developers and webmasters that need high-speed delivery and a stable development and hosting platform.
The CF-centric hosting service tries to pack as many logical, useful services as possible into its packages.
Website: https://cfdynamics.com
Hostek is an Adobe ColdFusion hosting partner. They maintain a team of ColdFusion experts on hand. They also offer Fusion Reactor, a ColdFusion Monitoring platform, along with their services.
Cost: In order to get a quote with Hostek, you must first schedule a free consultation with one of their experts who will help build a plan suitable for your company’s needs.
Website: https://hostek.com
Media3 ColdFusion hosting service has been around since 1995.
Website: https://www.media3.net/adobe.cfm
Newtek ColdFusion Web Hosting has provided ColdFusion hosting solutions since 1997. The company also provides regulatory-compliant solutions, including HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, FISMA, and more.
Website: https://newtektechnologysolutions.com/coldfusion-2018-hosting
Vivio Web Hosting services is a ColdFusion Hosting partner offering remote IT Server Management. It creates hosting plans individually giving control of IT infrastructure and costs.
Website: https://viviotech.net/coldfusion-hosting/
What about the people using open-source CFML, such as Lucee?
Here's the list of hosting services as well.
Hostek is an Adobe ColdFusion hosting partner. They maintain a team of ColdFusion experts on hand. They also offer Fusion Reactor, a ColdFusion Monitoring platform, along with their services.
Cost: In order to get a quote with Hostek, you must first schedule a free consultation with one of their experts who will help build a plan suitable for your company’s needs.
Website: https://hostek.com/
Website: https://www.hostmedia.co.uk
xByte Hosting offers cloud CF hosting for Lucee CFML. As you can see from the testimonials, the clients are happy with the efficiency and quality of their team's work.
Cost: You have the option to use a prebuilt plan or schedule a consult to build your own.
Website: https://www.xbytehosting.com/
An option that many CFers like to do is do a Lightsail deployment on AWS and use Lucee.
“Lightsail is just basically a very low-cost VPS with burst CPU capacity and a bunch of proprietary images.” – Steele Parker, in CF Programmers FB Group.
Website: Installing Lucee on AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
BONUS: Here's a guide to set it up with CommandBox, which has a very secure and fast production web server built-in.
“Linode and Lucee on a VM, perfect! And all in Europe. And, Linode support is one of the best I've encountered. Fast, 2 the point, knowledgeable and sincerely helpful. And even practical in helping. Do it 4 u or do it yourself, you choose 😁.” - Sebastiaan Naafs-van Dijk
Website: Onlinebase
Congratulations for making it to the end of this post! This is a long, comprehensive, and exhausting list, but the stakes are high for you and your company.
We still think that it is not possible for one service to offer the best configuration for all companies. The best ColdFusion hosting choice for your project depends on many factors that we discussed above.
Remember to keep your company’s goals, infrastructure, and budget in mind when choosing a ColdFusion hosting vendor. Be sure to note your needs and restrictions.
Doing so will allow you to make the proper choice for all your ColdFusion hosting needs.
Are there any other factors you consider when choosing a ColdFusion hosting vendor?
What hosting service do you use and why?
MDN is a Mozilla website for developers.
IBM Developer has an interesting way of organising content on the developer home page.
I have been building a ribbon menu that can be placed at the top of every webpage at www.ajabbi.com—something similar to MS Office 365, Dreamweaver, and other products.
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I liked the look and functionality of the open-source MetroUI ribbon created by Olton from Ukraine.
So far, I have a working version that uses CSS that friends have been testing. Next, I will try HTMX as a testing comparison. HTMX should be able to handle the DOM to generate the live UI interactions.
I want to avoid using a JS single-page application architecture like React; it's unnecessary and complicates future maintenance and technical debt.
A recent issue of Architecture Notes had a reference to a blog article about the different types of UUID.
"Nicole dives into the world of UUIDs, explaining the eight different versions and their specific use cases. Here's a quick guide to help you choose the right UUID version for your needs. They also touch on the deprecated and specialized versions, highlighting that v7 should be used over v1 and v6 when possible, and v2 is reserved for specific, often secretive, security uses." - Architecture Notes
With eight different versions, which should you use? There are a few common use cases that dictate which you should use, and some have been replaced by others.
You'll usually be picking between two of them: v4 or v7. There are also some occasions to pick v5 or v8.
Per the RFC, v7 improves on v1 and v6 and should be used over those if possible. So you usually won't want v1 or v6. If you do want one of those, you can use v6.
These two articles about authentication, roles and permissions came from the WorkOS blog.
July 18, 2024
When building authorization for enterprise customers, supporting IdP role mapping is a challenging yet important task. This allows organizations to manage their roles and permissions through a single source of truth, the IdP, rather than dealing with unique permissions schemes for each SaaS tool.
So you’ve read Part I of our RBAC series, gotten a basic handle on RBAC and FGA, and think you’re ready to build enterprise-ready authorization into your app. Think again my friend! Most enterprises (and increasingly, smaller companies too) use an Identity Provider (IdP) like Okta to manage their internal user data. To support their needs, your authorization system will need to sync with and pull data from these platforms; and their APIs can be arcane, disorganized, and full of edge cases. This post will walk through how IdP integrations work with authorization and things to watch out for when building your own.
The basic concept of syncing with an IdP
The easiest way to think about the difference between regular authorization and IdP-based authorization is to consider the source:
For run of the mill authorization systems, the data source for roles, resources, and permissions are generated inside your app by your users
For IdP-based authorization systems, the data source for roles, resources, and permissions is an external data store (Okta, Azure AD, etc.)
Enterprises want to manage their organization’s roles and permissions from a single place instead of having to deal with tens (or hundreds) of different SaaS tools and their unique permissions schemes. So they designate different roles and groups in an IdP like Okta for each employee. An engineer might be in the engineering group, while a team lead for engineering might be in both the engineering group and the admin group.
Here’s where you come in: your app needs to be able to pull that user data from Okta and then map it to the relevant roles (or resources, if you’re on the FGA track) that exist in your scheme. For example, you might want everyone in the engineering group at a customer of yours to have view-only access to resources in your product, while admins have write access. We’ll talk more about this mapping layer later, since you will likely need to build a custom UI for it down the road.
Ajabbi takes an API-first approach. SaaS applications and their APIs are versioned the same, and i18n applies to each API.
Given that each build is human language specific, it makes sense to go with:
I am figuring out how to have REST and GraphQL API endpoints available for integration.
The Ajabbi website needs a simple way for people to print, email, or share any web page on social media. Tracking is not required, as it is against Ajabbi's privacy policy.
ShareThis is one option, and it's free.
I have some questions.
I concluded that ShareThis was breaching users' privacy. I am now using AddToAny, which anonymises the data collected.
"A social bookmarking website is a centralized online service that allows users to store and share Internet bookmarks. Such a website typically offers a blend of social and organizational tools, such as annotation, categorization, folksonomy-based tagging, social cataloging and commenting. The website may also interface with other kinds of services, such as citation management software and social networking sites. ..." - Wikipedia
"ShareThis is a technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It offers free website tools and plugins for online content creators. ShareThis collects data on user behavior, and provides this to advertisers and technology companies for ad targeting, analytics, and customer acquisition purposes. ShareThis has an exclusive license with the University of Illinois for patent applications made by co-founder David E. Goldberg. The patents include genetic algorithms and machine learning technologies used for the purposes of information collection and discovery based on a user's sharing behavior. ..." - Wikipedia
// render the html // load the buttons window.__sharethis__.load('inline-share-buttons', {/* this is where your configurations must be, read the Configuration section */
Once you’ve added the above portion of the code, you’re now able to include any or all of the following configuration options below.
config = {
alignment: STRING, // left, right, center, justified.
container: STRING, // id of the dom element to load the buttons into
enabled: BOOLEAN,
font_size: INTEGER, // small = 11, medium = 12, large = 16.
id: STRING, // load the javascript into a specific dom element by id attribute
labels: STRING, // "cta", "counts", or "none"
language: STRING // IETF language tag in which the buttons' labels are,
min_count: INTEGER, // minimum amount of shares before showing the count
padding: INTEGER, // small = 8, medium = 10, large = 12.
radius: INTEGER, // in pixels
networks: ARRAY[STRING],
show_total: BOOLEAN,
show_mobile_buttons: BOOLEAN, // forces sms to show on desktop
use_native_counts: BOOLEAN, // uses native facebook counts from the open graph api
size: INTEGER, // small = 32, medium = 40, large = 48.
spacing: INTEGER, // spacing = 8, no spacing = 0.
};
// render the html // load the buttons window.__sharethis__.load('inline-share-buttons', { alignment: 'left', id: 'my-inline-buttons', enabled: true, font_size: 11, padding: 8, radius: 0, networks: ['messenger', 'twitter', 'pinterest', 'sharethis', 'sms', 'wechat'], size: 32, show_mobile_buttons: true, spacing: 0, url: "https://www.sharethis.com", // custom url title: "My Custom Title", language: "en", image: "https://18955-presscdn-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ShareThisLogo2x.png", // useful for pinterest sharing buttons description: "My Custom Description", username: "ShareThis" // custom @username for twitter sharing });
| Social Service | data-network Code |
|---|---|
| Black Lives Matter | blm |
| Blogger | blogger |
| Buffer | buffer |
| Copy Link | copy |
| Diaspora | diaspora |
| Digg | digg |
| Douban | douban |
| Evernote | evernote |
| Gmail | gmail |
| Google Bookmarks | googlebookmarks |
| Hacker News | hackernews |
| Instapaper | instapaper |
| iOrbix | iorbix |
| Kakao | kakao |
| Koo App | kooapp |
| Line | line |
| LiveJournal | livejournal |
| Mail.Ru | mailru |
| Meneame | meneame |
| Messenger | messenger |
| Odnoklassniki | odnoklassniki |
| Outlook | outlook |
| getpocket | |
| Push to Kindle | kindleit |
| Qzone | qzone |
| Refind | refind |
| Renren | renren |
| Skype | skype |
| Surfingbird | surfingbird |
| Telegram | telegram |
| Tencent QQ | tencentqq |
| Threema | threema |
| Trello | trello |
| Tumblr | tumblr |
| Viber | viber |
| VK | vk |
| ShareThis | sharethis |
| Sina Weibo | |
| SMS | sms |
| Snapchat | snapchat |
| WordPress | wordpress |
| Yahoo Mail | yahoomail |
| Yummly | yummly |
The ShareThis tools load/display only the first time the site loads. In case you are using tools like the Image Share Buttons or Video Share Buttons and your site uses lazy loading or similar technologies you will need to reinitialize the tools once newer elements appear.
Since ShareThis searches for the images/embedded videos on that occasion only, and the images closer to the bottom aren’t loaded yet, ShareThis doesn’t know of their existence even if they do load later on, and won’t display the buttons on them.
As a workaround for this, the Javascript code below will check every 3 seconds if any scrolling is done, if so, it will reinitialize the buttons. We are using the scrolling as a way to know if the images have loaded; since the images load once a visitor scrolls to that specific part.
//state variable for scrolling
let scrolling = false;
//in case of scrolling, change the state of the scrolling variable to true
window.onscroll = function() {
scrolling = true;
}
/*create an interval that checks every 3 seconds the state of the scrolling variable, if any scrolling has been done in that interval, reinitialize the buttons*/
setInterval(() => {
if (scrolling) {
scrolling = false;
window.sharethis.initialize()
}
}, 3000);
Please keep in mind that Open Graph tags will take precedence when sharing on Facebook and other social channels. If linking to a custom URL, please be sure to have Open Graph tags filled out for that page as well.
As with our other tools, we recommend moving the site to live production before giving it a try as there are some resources that aren’t passed during a local/test environment.
It is important to remember the order of precedence by which the ShareThis code processes share properties. Generally, we recommend using one approach by which sharing properties are specified on your pages to prevent errors.